Biographie de UNGERER Tomi

Jean-Thomas "Tomi" Ungerer (born 28 November 1931) is an award-winning illustrator and a trilingual author. He has published over 140 books ranging from his much loved children’s books to his controversial adult work. He is famous for his sharp social satire and his witty aphorisms and he ranges from the fantastic to the autobiographical.

Tomi Ungerer was born in Strasbourg, Alsace. His mother Alice moved to Logelbach, near Colmar, after the death of Tomi’s father- an artist, engineer and Astronomical clock manufacturer- in 1936. Ungerer also lived through German occupation.

As a young man, Ungerer was inspired by the illustrations appearing in the New Yorker magazine, particularly the work of Saul Steinberg. (He was also influenced by artist like George Grosz and Paul Klee.) Ungerer moved to the United States in 1956. The following year, he published his first children’s book for Harper & Row “The Mellops Go Flying.” He also did illustration work for publications as: The New York Times, Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, The Villlage Voice and for the television. During this time he began to create posters denouncing the Vietnam war.

Upon the publication of Ungerer’s children’s book Moon Man in 1966, Maurice Sendak called it “easily one of the best picture books in recent years.”

After Allumette, a fable edited in 1974, with due respect to Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm Brothers and the honourable Ambros Bierce he ceased writing children’s books, focusing instead on adult-level books, many of which focused on sexuality. He eventually returned to children’s literature with Flix in 1988. Ungerer donated many of the manuscripts and artwork for his early children’s books to the Children’s Literature Research Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

In 1998 Ungerer was awarded the Hans Christian Andresen Award for illustration.

In 2007, his hometown deicated a museum to him, the Musée Tomi UNgerer / Centre international de l’illustration.

Ungerer currently divides his time between Mizen Head, in Ireland (where he and hid wife moved in 1976) and Strasbourg. IN addition to his work as an illustrator, he is also a designer and “archivist of human absurdity.”